More Indiana Pests

You may remember our post about periwinkle. In that post, we mentioned that we hate it.

Since then, we have discovered that other people hate the stuff, too. The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, for example, put this pesky ground cover on their list of The Worst Invasives in the New York Metropolitan Area.

Paghat the Ratgirl describes a very similar experience with periwinkle, or vinca, to our own on her webpage devoted to gardening. She writes, "Because it was so hard to pull up small mats of it, I would only struggle with it a couple times a week, loosening around the edges one day, shoveling beneath the edges another day, slowly working my way up the row under the shrubs. Eventually it was mostly removed, though bits of it would continue to pop up & be weeded out forever after."

She introduces her ruminations on the nasty plant with a poem by Cicely Mary Barker, and concludes with a bit of history, which we have stolen with her implicit permission for our little blog:

Vinca grew throughout the Roman world, as they brought the plant with them into regions of Roman conquest. Many of the tales of maenads or bacchantes bedecked in ivy probably regard vinca, especially when worn during rituals of death. The association of vinca with death is most ancient, worn as wreathes by human sacrifices, which tradition lingered well into the Middle Ages when vinca was used to garland criminals to be hung from scaffolds until dead. Simon Fraser, the follower of the Scottish hero William Wallace, was in 1306 led in irons through the streets of London enroute to execution, with a garland of vinca on his head. The ancient association of vinca with death in Italy was preserved in a tradition of weaving vinca garlands for dead infants, while in France it was known as "the Violet of Sorceries."

Its name used to be Pervinca or Pervinkle, with sundry other spellings & permutations, having Latin root indicating a band or wreath. This was in time corrupted into Periwinkle, though there is no resemblance to the sea snail. The "band" of periwinkle was a spiritual as well as a literal wreath, & Culpepper records an old tradition that if a man & woman eat vinca together, they will be forever bonded in love, a last echo of vinca's fertility association with the Great Mother, goddess both of death and birth.

UC Davis has some good information on periwinkle elimination, as well as a few words on its provenance and biological makeup: Booya. We find the chemical control section particularly interesting. Perhaps a new strategy is called for.

We still hate periwinkle.